


wherever it may lead

by anirondack



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Almost Canon-Compliant, Alternate Ending, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Character Death Fix, Fix-It, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-02
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2020-04-06 03:39:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19054492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anirondack/pseuds/anirondack
Summary: An alternate ending for Avengers: Endgame where Natasha gets to live.





	wherever it may lead

**Author's Note:**

> Howdy kids, I haven't written fic in two years but here we go.
> 
> title: Nomad // Black Label Society

“It’s okay. Let me go.”

Clint’s face is crumpling again, desperate noises lurking in his throat, and Natasha hates to see him this way, always. He looks like this so rarely that it’s easy to forget that he can. Clint cries like his world is falling apart and taking him with it, and Natasha supposes that it is. Clint learned to live without Laura - poorly, violently, and sadistically, but living. He has never learned to live without her too.

“No,” he whispers, with wet lips, through clenched teeth, and it hurts so much that she almost doesn’t see the flash of red and blue coming toward them. It comes without a sound, hurtling down from the cliff edge, and Clint never sees a thing when a shield smashes into the back of his head, sending them swinging to the side and knocking him out instantly. His grip on her goes lax, and Natasha has a split second to feel every feeling all over again - terror, happiness, hope, gratitude, rage, every emotion she’s ever conceived of, tearing her ribcage open in preparation - and then another hand closes around her wrist.

She opens her eyes and stares up into the face of Steve Rogers, who is dangling off the cliffside from a rope around his belt, with Thor’s old hammer knocking against his thigh and something tired and old in his gaze.

It takes a moment for her to remember how to speak, and Steve doesn’t rush her, even though he’s holding her up by one arm. He just looks at her, and then, against all odds, he laughs.

The laugh snaps Natasha out of it, and she hisses, “Steve. What the  _fuck_ are you doing.”

“Having a better idea,” Steve says. He shakes his head, still grinning. “Having a much better idea.”

“We don’t have time for this. How did you get here? We only have one round trip apiece.”

“Nat…” Steve opens his mouth. Closes it. Reconsiders. “We’ve got some time.”

 

Together, they slowly scale down the face of the cliffs. Natasha anchors her own line in the wall and they cut Clint’s unconscious body down. Steve hands Natasha his shield, and she gingerly slides it onto her arm as he tethers Clint to his chest, and they gently rappel down the cliff face. Natasha keeps looking over at Steve, and then Clint, and then the hammer –  _Thor’s_ hammer, she hadn’t really processed that before, but it’s hanging from Steve’s belt now like it’s a regular old construction hammer. She wants to ask about that, but it’s far down on the number of questions that she has, and Steve doesn’t look like he’s going to answer any of them this high up in the air.

Her feet touch down and she cuts her rope, then rushes over to take Clint’s body from Steve as he nears the ground. Clint’s head lolls against her shoulder and she holds him for maybe a second or two longer than necessary, then staggers a little and sits down hard on the ground. It’s dark down here, and something blackish runs around the cracks and dips of the rock. It might be blood. A sacrifice to the universe.

She lays Clint’s body down next to her, his head in her lap, as Steve starts working himself free of his own tethers. Her thumbs run unconsciously through the hair on the back of Clint’s head, searching for blood or obvious physical injury, but it seems to have been a clean hit. She wouldn’t be surprised if he was concussed, but Clint’s had more than one concussion before and he’ll be fine.

 _Fine_. That makes her laugh too, a strange little giggle with no amusement. Can either of them be fine? She doesn’t know how to get back to the top of that cliff, or how to get Clint back up so he can bring the stone back. Or how to get Steve back to the right time, if he’s here, which must mean that something went extremely wrong in 2012. Or how to make him let her give them the stone at all.

Christ.

“I know, it’s pretty crazy.” Steve’s voice is close now. She tilts her head slightly toward him as he sits down next to her. He sets the hammer at his side and she reaches over wordlessly to hand him his shield. He props it up against his thigh, then sighs and leans back, hands braced against the ground behind him. “This whole canyon of death. And the goddamn Red Skull is here. But it’s still pretty beautiful.”

“I’m not sure I want to call this place beautiful,” Natasha says. She looks at the sky, which is a deeply unsettling, twisting orange.

“No, maybe not,” Steve agrees. “But I’ve only done the space thing twice now, so it’s still pretty beautiful to me.”

“You’ve never been to space.”

“Just did. Two planets. Well, a planet and Asgard. Asgard may not be a planet.”

“I think it’s a realm. And– you haven’t, no. No you haven’t. Rhodey and Nebula went to Morag and Thor and Rocket went to Asgard. Where did the plan go wrong?”

“It didn’t.” She looks over at him, and he’s looking back. Smiling, with eyes that are so tired and a mouth with a cut on one lip. “It didn’t go wrong at all.”

Natasha licks her lip and swallows. It tastes like blood and the gunpowder in Clint’s arrows. “Steve.”

“We did it, Nat. We got them all. Each and every one of them. And we got them all back.”

The air evaporates out of Natasha’s lungs. Her fingers tighten in Clint’s hair. She stares at him with wide eyes, until he shakes his head and laughs a little wheezy sigh of a laugh again.

“Thanos...?”

“Gone. Back and gone again. Dusted.”

“Dusted?”

“Tony.”

“Steve.” Natasha’s voice is trembling a bit. “How far back did you come?”

“Just as far as you did,” Steve says. He reaches over and drops his hand on hers and squeezes. She squeezes back, desperate for something to hold onto. “Just a few weeks later.”

“How…?”

“We  _won_ , Natasha. And when Dr. Pym came back, we got enough particles to set everything right again. So here I am.”

Natasha blinks at him. Her head hurts from the explosion arrow. “You lived.”

“Damned if it wasn’t close.”

“Clint?”

“He made it. He made it alright. And Bruce, and Thor, and Scott and Nebula and–”

“Tony.”

Steve’s expression drops, and so does Natasha’s stomach. “No,” he says after a pause. “No, he– he laid down on the line for us. He held all the stones, and that was too much.”

“But Thanos...”

“No match for Stark,” Steve says. He smiles again, but just with his mouth this time. “A whole damn army from space and time, and he was no match for Tony Stark.”

Natasha swallows again. She looks down at Clint and strokes shaky fingers through his hair. “And me?”

“You stayed here,” Steve says. He says it matter of factly, but Natasha’s known him for long enough that she can hear the pain. “You stayed here and Clint came home with the stone.”

It feels like a stab in the gut. But it also feels like relief. She nods. “Good.”

“We could have used you, at the end,” Steve says softly.

“I was more useful here. I was needed here.”

“You’re always needed, Natasha,” Steve corrects her. “Always. Who kept the planet above water for all those years?”

“Lack of new carbon emissions.”

“Nat.”

“It had to be done.” She shakes her head. “Had to be done, and I could do it. Just like this.”

“Just like this,” Steve agrees. He sighs. “Just like this.”

He falls quiet, and she doesn’t speak up. Together, they look out over the craggy expanse of rock that they’d been hurtling toward moments before. Natasha breathes in through her nose and out through her mouth and tries to calm her heart rate. It feels comforting to have Steve next to her, even though this Steve doesn’t feel like the Steve she left behind hours ago. She leans her shoulder against his and he squeezes her hand, and it feels like being on the run together again.

“What are you doing here, Steve.”

“Fixing things,” Steve says. “Setting them right.”

“Kinda messed that one up when you stopped me getting the stone, I think.”

“Oh, that’s alright. Do you want to see it?” Steve reaches into a compartment on his belt and produces a small, glowing gold stone. Natasha instinctively pulls back a bit, but she reaches her hand out and Steve sets the stone in her palm. She rolls it between her fingers, and then holds it up to the dim light. “The soul stone,” Steve murmurs as she turns it one way, and then the other. “The last piece of the puzzle.”

“Where are the others?”

“I put them back already,” Steve says. “Got to see old New York again, got to go to space. Got to see Thor’s mom – she caught me but she was awfully polite about it.” Natasha huffs out a laugh through her nose. “Saw all kinds of things out here. So this is the last one.”

“Well… I think you’re a little early,” Natasha says. “We don’t have the stone yet. You’re supposed to drop them right after we leave.”

“S’pose you’re right,” Steve says. He looks out over the terrain again.

Natasha watches him. She takes in the exhausted slope of his shoulders and the way he favors parts of his body. He looks together, but there’s something underneath that still hurts. She reminds herself that he’s not indestructible. He always seems like it, but she’s seen him in the hospital more than once and it feels wrong every single time.

“Did you come to say goodbye?” she asks eventually. “I know we didn’t get to at base.”

“We didn’t. Last thing you said to me, ‘see you in a minute’.”

“That didn’t really work out.”

“Nope.”

“I appreciate it. You coming here. I regretted it, when I was fighting with Clint. Not saying goodbye, I mean.”

“Yeah?”

“Of course. I would have said something different, if I’d known. Something honest.”

“Well, we’ll get a do-over.”

Natasha nods. “I’d like that a lot.”

Steve smiles again. It’s a real one. It’s a smile she knows is private and honest. A smile that had been thrown to her under a beard while hiding from the government and hiding from a half-empty world in a compound that was much emptier. It makes her heart ache, and her eyes are suddenly stinging.

“Oh, Nat,” Steve says softly. He lets go of her hand and wraps his arm around her shoulders again. She gratefully tucks her head against his. “It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay.”

“That’s what I told Clint,” Natasha murmurs. “That he could let me go. That it was going to be okay.”

“It will. It will be okay.” Steve’s cheek leans against the top of her head, and she feels safe. She feels stupid, for feeling safe in outer space on a death planet with her imminent demise staring her in the face and her partner unconscious in her lap. But she always feels safe with Steve. It’s hard not to.

Steve’s lips press against her hair, and then he pulls back. Natasha’s heart sinks, and her adrenaline kicks in instantly and she has to remind herself not to run this time. A lifetime of running away from death has made her reflexes sharp, and it’s hard to stay still. But Steve just pulls out his teleporter control and turns it over in his hands, then holds it out to her.

Natasha stares at it. “What.”

“Trade me,” Steve says.

“What?”

“Trade me. Give me yours.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s got the right coordinates in it.”

Natasha frowns. “You’ll go back to the wrong place.”

“You’ll go back to the right one.”

Natasha stares at him, and then her eyes widen and she shakes her head. “Oh, no. No, no, no. You can’t think I’m going to let you do that.”

“I can,” Steve says mildly. “Trade me.”

“Are you out of your mind? You don’t have to do this. That–” she gestures at the cliff edge far above them “–is how things were meant to work out. What did Strange say? Fourteen million to one odds. And we got that one. You can’t mess with that.”

“We did,” Steve agrees. “We got it. And it cost so, so much.” He looks away from her, back over the expanse of nothing. “You know how much it cost, Natasha. You saw how the world crumbled. You saw how it beat us down and it took and took long after Thanos was dead.”

“It can get fixed now,” Natasha says. “You can start to heal. The whole world can start to heal.”

“It can,” Steve agrees. “And it needs someone to do that. The world needs someone who can start to pick up the pieces.”

He looks at he again, finally, and Natasha meets his gaze, then shakes her head. “You’re crazy, Rogers.”

“Who held it together for five years?” Steve presses. “Who didn’t listen to me when I said to move on?”

“Steve.”

“Who ran the Avengers while I was running around support groups being a motivational poster boy–”

“Steve–”

“It was  _you_ , Natasha,” Steve says forcefully. “You ran the Avengers. Tony left and I stopped and the whole team, any of them could have been leaders, but it was  _you_. You protected the world – what was left of it, anyway. The world and all the people in it and all the planets around it when you could. And that’s exactly what this new world needs the most.”

“Steve,” Natasha whispers.

“It doesn’t need me,” Steve says. His voice grows soft now. “It doesn’t. What’s a figurehead when the world’s been ripped up like this? What’s a soldier when the war is so much bigger than just a fight? Figureheads break and soldiers die all the time.” He shakes his head. “Natasha, they need you. They need you so much more than they need me.”

Steve looks over at the shield, then pulls it into his lap. It looks freshly polished, or perhaps freshly made. Natasha doesn't think it's the same shield he took into battle at the end. Steve looks down at it, and runs his thumb around the rings.

“I saw,” he starts, then pauses. “I saw what it would be like. To die, I mean. Pointlessly. It wasn’t like crashing a plane into the ocean to stop an explosion, or anything like that. At the end… I gave all of it. It wasn’t enough, but I gave all of it, and Thanos kicked the crap out of me and the shield and if Bruce’s snap hadn’t worked, then that would have been it. Natasha… I’m  _tired_.”

Natasha nods. She barely dares to breathe.

“I’m tired,” Steve says again quietly, and god, but he is. It’s evident in every line of his body. It’s obvious in the ribs that are just barely unbroken, and the cuts that still haven’t quite healed, and the invisible weights that drag his shoulders down. She’s never seen him so exhausted as now. “Y’know, Buck always said that I was a kid too dumb to run from a fight. And now the big fight’s over and maybe I should do a little bit of running.”

“I don’t understand."

“What needs to be done, I don’t think I can do,” Steve says. “And you can. I know you can. But you don’t need me for that, and maybe there’s some other place that does. Somewhere out there.” He turns the shield in his hands. “I’ve spent a lot of time being Captain America. Even before the serum. Born on July fourth and everything, some kinda cosmic joke. It’s all I really know. And I think… I think I might be just in time to give up that life.”

“The stone,” Natasha breathes.

“Soul for soul,” Steve agrees. “Like Nebula said.”

“Will that work?”

“I hope so. You give up what you love here, and… I loved being Captain America, you know?” Steve laughs a little. “I loved it so much, and all the crap that came with it. To be able to lead, to help someone. To do good.”

“You can still do that.”

“I’m doing it now. The good I’m doing, the greater good, is letting the better leader step in. It’s you, Natasha, it has to be.”

Natasha’s mind is racing. Parts of her want to push back, these small and scared parts that believe that Steve is a better leader and a better person than she’ll ever be. Parts that are afraid of living in a world without Steve Rogers.

But parts of her know that the things he’s saying make sense. And Steve is just so tired. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. I believe it’s for the best. Genuinely.”

“I’m not sure everyone else is going to feel like that.”

“I think that everyone else will be able to get over it,” Steve replies, one corner of his mouth quirking up a bit. “There are all kinds of heroes, Nat. I’m sure some new ones will pop up soon enough. And they’ll have you to follow.”

She wants to make a joke, but all that comes out is a soft whisper. “I’m going to miss you, Steve.”

His expression wavers a little and she sees another flash of that heartbreak. “I’m gonna miss you too, Nat. I’m gonna miss everyone, and especially you. But I’ll run into you again.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Not for sure, no. But I believe it.” His smile is a little watery, and she can’t stand it. She leans into him again and he opens his arms and he hugs her so tightly that maybe they can fuse with the rocks and she doesn’t have to do this. She doesn’t have to let Steve go and walk off into the vastness of space, and come back home after her own death with the news that he traded his life for hers and face the look on everyone’s faces that she thought she was an equal trade.

But Steve is right, maybe. Natasha knows how to lead. She knows how to push through. And it sounds like the world is going to need someone to push through.

She lets him go and scrubs at one eye with the back of her hand. “Guess I’m Captain America now,” she says, a little teary, and Steve laughs. Natasha does too, and Clint’s head bounces a little on her thigh.

“Mm, I don’t think so,” Steve murmurs. He runs his thumb around a ring of the shield again. “But I think we both know someone who could be.”

In spite of everything, that makes Natasha smile. “Yeah, I think you’re right.”

“Suit won’t fit him,” Steve says. “But I’m sure you’ll be able to make do.”

“Yeah.” Her heart hurts so much. Somehow, this feels just as bad as trying to force Clint to let her go. She feels like a hypocrite. “Where will you go?”

“Oh, around,” Steve says airily, like he’s describing a vacation to New York and not the entire universe. “Nebula said there’s lots of planets to look at. I bet I can find a few she mentioned. I’ll just stick my thumb out and see what picks me up.”

“You’re awfully cavalier about this.”

“Terrified, actually,” Steve corrects. “But it feels right. I’ve been fighting at home for so long. It’ll be nice to give the nomadic lifestyle a try.”

Natasha nods. She breathes out slowly through her nose, and then she nods again, more to herself than anything. “Okay. How are you going to do this?”

“I’ll take your teleporter, and then I’ll sacrifice Cap,” Steve says. “And I’ll grab Clint and I’ll end up back up at the top of the cliff, or at least that’s what he said happened. And I’ll leave this stone with fucking Red Skull and Clint will wake up with the new one. And then we’ll all be gone. Onto the next thing.”

“Onto the next thing,” Natasha echoes. “God dammit, Rogers.”

Steve laughs again. “Gonna miss that too. Help me get Clint.”

Natasha brushes her fingers through his hair one more time, and then they roll and drag Clint’s body over to Steve. They stand up and trade teleporters, and Steve fiddles with the coordinates on his while Natasha drags Clint upright. Steve slips the teleporter onto his hand and gets a good hold on Clint. Clint's head falls back against Steve’s shoulder, his expression slack. Natasha hates looking at him like this, and she hates what Steve is doing, and she hates all of this.

“This is it, huh?” she asks, turning Steve’s teleporter over in her hands.

“For now.” Steve gives her one more of those safe, private smiles. “I love you, Nat. And I love the rest of them too. I’ll be carrying all of you with me, and I know you’ll all carry me with you too.”

A tear slips down Natasha’s cheek. She leaves it.

“You’re gonna be amazing,” he tells her. “I believe that. You’re going to be absolutely amazing.”

He looks down at the shield in his hand and turns it a bit one last time. Some light glints off of the star, and then Steve takes a deep breath, squeezes Clint against him, and tosses the shield onto the ground. Natasha takes a step back as it clatters against the rock. She sucks in a breath like the wind’s been knocked out of her, and nothing happens for a moment. But then a flash of light comes for them and catches Steve, surrounding him and Clint, and she can only dig her nails into her palms as she watches the light steal them away, back up the wall of rock and over the cliff, leaving her standing alone.

She stares up at the edge of the cliff. She stares for a long time. And then suddenly, there’s a flash of red, the same red that’s in the vials she’s carrying with her, and she knows that Steve is gone. It hits in her gut and twists, and for a long moment, she can’t breathe. She closes her eyes and grits her teeth and eventually, she’s able to relax and suck in a huge gasp of air. Breathing feels the same, but everything is so different now.

Natasha takes a couple steps and stumbles as her boot lands on the edge of the shield. She hesitates for a moment, then leans down and picks it up. It feels like it always does, heavy and smooth and humming a little. She glances back up at the cliff, but Steve doesn’t materialize, so she slides the shield back onto her arm and gets a grip on one of the arm straps. It’s a little too big for her to hold comfortably, and that feels like a certain type of fate.

She has to go, before Clint regains consciousness and sees her. She slips the teleporter back onto her hand and reactivates her suit’s helmet. It closes around her and locks her in, and she lets out a long, slow breath and then presses the button.

 

The process of being sucked through time and space is disorienting, and long, and instant, and uncomfortable, and then suddenly, Natasha’s standing in the middle of a forest clearing. She stumbles a little as her molecules readjust to their correct size and her vision clears. She looks up to see Bruce and Sam standing at a control panel and staring at her, and then down to see that she’s standing on another portal like the one in the Avengers compound, and then back up again.

“Uh, Bruce,” Sam says slowly. “I think you may have done it wrong.”

“I… don’t think I did,” Bruce says, looking baffled.

Natasha looks between the two of them, and then her legs give out a little bit. She stumbles again, and hands catch her, and when she looks up, she sees Bucky, staring at her intently like he can see what happened on a planet ten years ago.

He helps her off the platform and over to a bench. Sam trails behind them, and when Natasha sits, Bucky retreats and Sam sits down next to her instead. She reaches up and opens up her helmet and it folds away, and the noise of the earth hits her. It’s… louder than it was before, she thinks. The birds are louder. Or maybe there are more of them.

Oh god. There  _are_ more of them.

“They really did it,” she murmurs.

“You’re back,” Sam counters.

“I– yeah. I’m back.”

“Could’a sworn Clint said you couldn’t.”

“I could have sworn that too.”

Sam’s eyes dart down to the shield, and then back up to Natasha’s face. She averts her gaze. “Looks like someone else isn’t coming back, though.”

“He might,” Natasha says. “He might, one day.” She hefts the shield up into her lap and looks at it. “He isn’t... You know… He didn’t die.”  _I didn’t kill him._ “He’s still out there. In space. Probably getting into all kinds of shit.”

Sam raises his eyebrows. “In space.”

She nods. “He made a deal. A sacrifice. And then he left… to go see the rest of the universe.”

“The shield.”

“And the name. And the job, and the life. Captain America. He gave it up, because he thought it was the best good he could do.”

“That sounds like the kind of convoluted bullshit Steve would come up with.”

“But it worked,” Natasha says. “He wanted us all to rebuild. Start to heal things that were broken. Make the world better. And… he’s out there, making other worlds better.”

Sam looks off past the trees. “That’s a hell of a trade.”

“Yeah,” Natasha agrees. “I’m gonna make sure it was a worthwhile one.” She runs her thumb around the shield, like Steve had done, then says, “There’s one other thing he wanted.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” She picks up the shield, and then gently pushes it into Sam’s lap instead. “Just because Steve’s gone doesn’t mean there can’t be a Captain America.”

Sam’s eyes snap back to her, and his hands hover over the shield, like he’s suddenly afraid to touch it. “Nat.”

“We couldn’t think of a better person. Either of us.” She finally looks at him, and she finds some calm from his wide, almost panicked expression. “It’s what he wanted, and it’s what I wanted. And it’s what we need, I think. We still need a Captain America.”

“I…” Sam starts, then falters. He lets his hands drop onto the shield, finally.

“Try it on.”

Sam hesitates, but he picks up the shield and slides his arm through the straps. It fits him comfortably. He doesn’t have to reach to hold it.

“How does it feel?” Natasha asks.

Sam considers. “Like it belongs to someone else.”

“It doesn’t.” She reaches over and rests her hand on his shoulder, stroking along the seam of his shirt with her thumb.

Sam swallows, and then looks back behind him. Natasha does too, and she sees Bucky watching them from a few yards away. He looks back at them, and nods. Natasha nods back, and another knot of tension relaxes in her chest.

They turn back and look out over the view. Sam slides the shield off of his arm and rests it in his lap, holding onto it like a comfort blanket. “I’ll do my best,” he says eventually.

“I know,” Natasha agrees. “We both know. That’s why it’s yours.”

That lifts the corners of Sam’s mouth a little, and he reaches up to take her hand. They lace their fingers together, and they stare out into the newly repopulated world. Natasha thinks about finding Clint, and talking to Bruce, and getting back to the compound, and visiting Pepper, and a million things that she has to do now. But for a moment, she just raises her eyes up toward the sky, and she imagines Steve up there, getting into trouble, and she smiles.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Here's my alternate ending for Endgame. I was mostly very happy with the movie, but if you weren't, that's also cool. The idea is based off of Steve Rogers's comic persona Nomad, which he takes on after abandoning being Captain America in the 70s. 
> 
> I think that being Cap is something deeply integral to Steve, and that giving it up is a serious sacrifice. Would it work for this purpose? It's fanfiction based on a movie based on a comic book. B)


End file.
